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Watergate, Impeachment, and the Constitution

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Watergate, Impeachment, and the Constitution University of Chicago Law School Chicago Unbound Journal Articles Faculty Scholarship 1974 Watergate, Impeachment, and the Constitution Philip B. Kurland Follow this and additional works at: https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/journal_articles Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Philip B. Kurland, "Watergate, Impeachment, and the Constitution," 45 Mississippi Law Journal 531 (1974). This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Scholarship at Chicago Unbound. It has been accepted for inclusion in Journal Articles by an authorized administrator of Chicago Unbound. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WATERGATE, IMPEACHMENT, AND THE CONSTITUTION* I have little confidence in my own infallibility, and as little in the infallibility of others. Sir Robert Peel I. INTRODUCTION Scandals in the United States, and not least political scandals, have usually been short-term affairs. In most such instances, the press publishes the charges of wrongdoing with its accustomed fervent, often noisome, self-righteousness. Usually, the accused is quickly condemned by the public, often removed from office and soon forgotten, as with Sherman Adams, or Abe Fortas, or Spiro Agnew, or left to the long- drawn processes of the criminal law, as with Bobby Baker or Otto Ker- ner. In the latter event, the press coverage is ordinarily intense and titillating during the period of the trial, but the case is soon beyond the interest of the American public. Seldom do the hot political cases in- volve more than the pecadilloes of a single, temporarily high-placed official; seldom do the cases present basic problems of a constitutional nature. The Watergate affair is different. It is different because the imme- diate criminal acts are but symptoms of a deeper and more fundamental ailment. It is different because it is not concerned with underlings, but with personages who have held the governance of the nation in their soiled hands. It is different because the essence of the wrongdoing is not to be found in the greed for money. It is different because it raises important constitutional questions, not least of which is, as President Nixon constantly reminds us, the question of the proper scope of the presidency itself in our constitutional democracy. Not the XYZ affair, not the corruption of the Grant administration, not the Teapot Dome scandal, not all of them together cut so deep a wound in the American body politic. The only analogue that comes to my mind does not derive from American history at all. It is, rather, the Dreyfus affair that shook the French Republic at the turn of the century and consumed a decade in its unfolding and its cure.' One is also reminded by the facts of Water- *Copyright 1974. Philip B. Kurland. This article is published with the permission of the author. 'See D. LEwis, PRISONERS OF HONOR: THE DREYFUS AFFAIR (1973). MISSISSIPPI LA W JOURNAL [VOL. 45 gate of Emile Zola's speech in his own defense at his trial for defama- tion: Do you not understand now that what the nation is dying of is the obscurity in which there is an obstinate determination to leave it? The blunders of those in authority are being heaped upon those of others; one lie necessitates another, so that the mass is becoming formidable. A blunder was committed, and then to hide it a fresh crime against good sense and equity has had daily to be committed! The responsibility lies with the power which, to cover the guilty, and in furtherance of political interests, has denied everything, hoping to be strong enough to prevent the truth from being shed. It has maneu- vered in behalf of darkness, and it alone is responsible for the present distraction of conscience. .A nation cannot be thus upset without imperiling its moral existence. This is an exceptionally serious hour.' And it was William James who wrote, at the time of the Dreyfus case: Talk of corruption! We don't know what the word corruption means at home, with our improvised and shifting agencies of crude pecuniary bribery, compared with the solidly entrenched and perma- nently organized corruptive genuises of monarchy, nobility, church, Army, that penetrate the very bosom of the higher kind as well as the lower kind of people in all European states . and sophisticate their motives away from the impulse to straightforward handling of any 3 simple case. We now know the kind of corruption of which James then wrote. Certainly, as the Agnew case revealed, "crude pecuniary bribery" is still with us. But we have achieved the sophistication of European depravity. Niccolo Machiavelli advised his prince: "If the chief party, whether it be the people, or the army, or the nobility, which you think most useful and of most consequence to you for the conservation of your dignity, be corrupt, you must follow their humor and indulge them, and in that case honesty and virtue are pernicious."' And the events of Watergate sug- gest that, for the highest officials of our realm, "honesty and virtue are pernicious." Even so, the immediate events of Watergate are not so threatening to our democracy as the more fundamental ailment of which Watergate is only a symptom. In his recent tour-de-force, in some ways an apologia Proces Zola d~troute Le Coeur d'Assises de la Seine et le Coeur de Cassation (7 Fevrier-23 Fevrier, 31 Mars-Avril 1898) (21 February). 3 N. HALASZ, CAPTAIN DREYFUS: THE STORY OF A MASS HYSTERIA 233 (1955). 'N. MACHIAVELLI, DE PRINEIBATIBU ch. xix (1513). 1974] MEMORIAL LECTURES pro sua vita, Arthur Schlesinger noted the terminal illness that threat- ens us: For Watergate was a symptom, not a cause. Nixon's supporters com- plained that his critics were blowing up a petty incident out of all proportion to its importance. No doubt a burglary at Democratic head- quarters was trivial next to a mission to Peking. But Watergate's im- portance was not simply in itself. Its importance was in the way it brought to the surface, symbolized and made politically accessible the great question posed by the Nixon administration in every sector-the question of presidential power. The unwarranted and unprecedented expansion of presidential power, because it ran through the whole Nixon system, was bound, if repressed at one point, to break out at another. This, not Watergate, was the central issue.' Clearly, Schlesinger was correct in his analysis. But, possibly because he was an agent of earlier administrations, he did not see that the disease was contracted before Nixon came to power. The power of arrog- ance, the cancer that could kill our republic, was fully impregnated by the Kennedy administration, grew under the Johnson administration, and only achieved its culmination under Nixon. Tom Wicker, of the New York Times-certainly no ally of the Nixon administration-could see more clearly what Schlesinger failed to perceive. Anticipating the title of Schlesinger's book, The Imperial Presidency, Wicker wrote in one of his columns: .. it was "strong" Democratic Presidents who did the most to expand the Presidency to its present imperial status. [T]he doctrine of implied powers . is primarily the product of liberal Democratic thought and policy and ultimately was bound to lead to abuse. This is not a justification for Watergate or any other excessive use of state power, it ought to be a warning, however, that liberal Demo- crats will not automatically end the threat to liberty inherent in the imperial Presidency merely by coming back to power in 1976.6 I shall return at the end of my remarks to this most fundamental constitutional problem. Here, however, I should like to examine one of the other, subordinate constitutional issues spewed up by the Watergate affair: the issue of impeachment. No one should undertake constitutional exegesis without acknowl- edging the first principle of construction as announced by Marshall in his greatest opinion.7 It was in McCulloch v. Maryland"that he admon- 'A. SCHLESINGER, THE IMPERIAL PRESIDENcY 275 (1973). 'New York Times, Oct. 2, 1973, at 43, col. 1. 7See FELIX FRANKFURTER ON THE SUPREME COURT 535 (P. Kurland ed. 1970). 117 U.S. (4 Wheat.) 316, 407 (1819). MISSISSIPPI LAW JOURNAL [VOL. 45 ished: "[Wie must never forget that it is a constitution we are expound- ing." As Felix Frankfurter has pointed out: "The Constitution is, of course, a legal document, but a legal document of a fundamentally different order from an insurance policy or a lease of timberland."' And his meaning, as Marshall's, is enlightened by reference to Mr. Justice Holmes's statement of the nature of constitutional languages: [T]he provisions of the Constitution are not mathematical formulas having their essence in their form; they are organic living institutions transplanted from English soil. Their significance is vital not formal; it is to be gathered not simply by taking the words and a dictionary, but by considering their origin and the line of their growth. 0 And to none of the Constitution's provisions is such an approach more necessary than to those concerned with impeachment. All the more because we have no guidance from judicial opinions. There have been no Supreme Court decisions to tell us what article II, section 4 of the Constitution means. We can rely only on the words of the Constitution, their purpose and function, and their history, both before and after their inclusion in the basic document. We are somewhat handicapped in our search for meaning in article II, section 4, not only because our judicial masters have not told us what to think, but because most of the available authoritative opinion derives from those speaking as partisans.
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